Tag Archives: god

Why the Last Verse in the Gospel of John is so important to Me as a Historian

What I like about narrative history is the story of a person in the past. I find someone I can identify with, someone whose life intrigues me, a life that I wish to relive, as it were, re-create. I love … Continue reading

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Georges Lemaître and the Big Bang: The Limits of Piety

Georges Lemaître was a Catholic priest and military veteran who in the 1920s and 1930s made astonishing theoretical discoveries that overturned the steady-state universe, the eternal unchanging universe that astronomers had believed in for millennia. Father Lemaître argued that the … Continue reading

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Love and the Old Testament

Thousands of years ago Abraham, a herder traveling from Mesopotamia, came to a land he called Canaan where the “god of the high mountain,” a jealous god who demanded exclusivity, announced Himself. Abraham and his descendants experienced a singular relationship … Continue reading

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Eros and Agape: The Greek Origins of Christian Love

In his first encyclical, Pope Benedict XVI looked over the course of his life beginning before World War II, in which he witnessed firsthand the propensity of human beings to hate, interspersed with episodes of what the world called love. … Continue reading

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Do not Fear Death, because Perfect Love Casts out Fear

Death is the last act of life that occurs in an instant in time, yet it opens to eternity. Hence the moment and the eternal are combined at once in death. Death is a time when our perceptions of life … Continue reading

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Reflections on Erich Fromm, “The Art of Loving”

For Erich Fromm (1900-1980), the German-American psychologist, love is active power, where one preserves one’s own integrity. Love helps overcome separation and anxiety, stimulates union. Love is part of a need to know, to know someone else or self. It … Continue reading

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Son of Man

Today we celebrate the birth of  the unknown, Who came to earth as all men of a  mother born, He proclaimed himself unique coming to atone, For the sins of all mankind so forlorn. Such pain he took upon himself, … Continue reading

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Robert Hamilton, Baptist Missionary, and the Jesus Road

Robert Hamilton, a friend and associate of Mary P. Jayne and Joseph S. Murrow, was one of the first missionaries sent by the American Baptist Home Mission Society to western Oklahoma; Hamilton worked with the Cheyenne and Arapaho people from … Continue reading

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Pious Scientists in the Late Middle Ages

Piety, the awe and respect for God and His Creation, drove philosophers and scientists throughout the Christian era beginning during the Roman Empire and continuing through the European Middle Ages—and beyond. Christian philosopher-scientists relied heavily on their Greek and Roman … Continue reading

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Piety and Science

Records of the human quest for knowledge have existed for four to five thousand years, revealing that as humans have confronted the vastness of the cosmos, as they have watched and listened and felt the natural environment, their response has … Continue reading

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